UPCOMING EVENTS

Scoop.it, a tool that lets people gather and distribute content from around the Web based their interests and passions, is launching publicly today after a year in an invite-only beta. A robust algorithm helps you find relevant articles and videos, but the real appeal of Scoop.it is that anyone can be a magazine editor, curating and sharing attractive topic pages.

“Social media has been built on top of social networks, and the two are different,” Scoop.it co-founder and chief executive officer Guillame Decugis told VentureBeat. Decugis says that people want to express themselves in social media, but there’s too much noise. “I think we’re moving back to a web where quality matters again.”

The Scoop.it search algorithm helps you find great content, but it’s the human touch that makes the Scoop.it experience so sticky, because a person can understand the relationship between items and pick out what’s important much better than any machine can.

The term “curation” has been floating around lot lately, and Scoop.it is far from the only company in the space. Startups like PearlTrees and Curated.by are just a few of the dozens of such tools out there. “We’re unique in the sense you have the ability to create a magazine,” says Decugis. Scoop.it gets more than 2 million visits per month, and traffic is growing by 35 percent month.

The company is beginning to experiment with a premium model that will allow businesses and others to embed branded versions of their topic page onto their own sites. Insightful, intelligent curation around a topic will demonstrate expertise for a business owner or a guru, and they can also generate pretty strong SEO for themselves. The premium version of Scoop.it will also include an analytics tool that can be accessed for a monthly fee.